The Unfettered Critic – by Paula Block Edrmann & Terry Erdmann
A Walk in the Woods: From a Hike to a book to a movie
The Jacksonville Woodlands Park and Trail System meanders above and around town, providing access to panoramic views and historic landmarks. The trails have been an expanding treasure since the Woodlands Association was founded in l989 in hopes of preserving the forest from threatened development. Those of us who regularly travel the trails revel in the flourishing madrone, oak and pine covered beauty. At the moment, the trails run for fourteen colorful miles.
The granddaddy of American hiking paths, The Appalachian Trial, is, of course, longer. Much longer. It runs for 2,200 miles, through fourteen states, from Georgia to Maine, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains, Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah Valley and other eastern topographical highlights too numerous to mention. Just thinking about it makes you want to slip into your boots, pack up and set out, doesn’t it? But if you can’t take five months off for the trek, we recommend a great book that’ll give you a taste of the experience.
Author Bill Bryson’s 1998 “A Walk in the Woods,” details a first person, step-by-step view of the trip up the Appalachian Trail. He captures the ardor for the journey, the exhaustion (again, 2,200 miles), the discomfort (think rain), the distractions (a perpetually lost geezer known as Chicken John, an “awesomely brainless” woman named Mary Ellen), and the potential dangers (wolves and bears). The wolves and bears, by the way, are mostly in the author’s head, and yet he ponders: “A black bear will continue chewing on you until you are considerably past caring.”
Bryson’s hilarious writing style is equal parts Garrison Keillor and Dave Barry. You’ll chuckle as he describes stepping off rocks into waterways that shouldn’t be there. And you’ll guffaw at the antics of his traveling companion, Stephen Katz, an out of shape, junk-food junkie who’s more suited to a city bar stool than a tent by a campfire. If Katz reminds you of Falstaff, you’re on the right track. Or trail.
Yet it’s when Bryson describes the views, the silence and the wooded splendor—relating the ways that hiking gets under your skin, into your blood and draws you under its spell—that you’ll really feel his literary prowess. Consider, for example, his description of the moon as “the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie.” Could anything be more comforting during a long night in the wilderness? Throughout his journey, Bryson covers every subject of import to a hiker: history, botany, geology, zoology, meteorology, and scathing reviews of the work done or not done by the Unites States Forestry Service. The man is a walking (pun intended) encyclopedia. And if you’re in the market for some new hiking equipment, he provides the ultimate shopping list, including reviews of backpacks that have “a 70-denier high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a ripstop weave,” although, he admits, “the seams are lap felled rather than bias taped, and the vestibule is a little cramped.” Seriously. You’ve gotta read this stuff before you go shopping.
And now we get to the really exciting part. Since 2005, actor, director and producer Robert Redford has been keen on making a movie based on Bryson’s book. The original plan was for him to star as Bryson, and for Paul Newman (Butch Cassidy to Redford’s Sundance Kid, as you recall) to play Katz. Sadly, Newman passed away during preproduction, leaving the world without that great actor and philanthropist, and Redford without his old friend and co-star. Redford isn’t known, however, for giving up on his dreams. Now actor Nick Nolte (48 Hours, The Prince of Tides) has signed to play Katz. And Redford is going to direct. It’s a task he’s good at; he’s proven it many times, helming Ordinary People, The Horse Whisperer, A River Runs Through It and more.
A Walk in the Woods—the movie—won’t be at our local theaters until sometime in 2015. When it arrives we’ll be first in line for tickets. Meanwhile, we have our own trails to hike, right here, above and around town. Hope to see you there.
Paula and Terry each have long impressive-sounding resumes implying that they are battle-scarred veterans of life within the Hollywood studios. They’re now happily relaxed into Jacksonville.
Paula and Terry identify as writers, with an ever-increasing number of published works to support the supposition. They live a primarily pastoral life in the enchanted town of Jacksonville.